The Top 100 Tracks of 2009

40. Bear in Heaven
"Lovesick Teenagers"[Hometapes]

As we get older and wiser, most of us learn how to control our emotions. But as much as we manage our expectations and tell ourselves that we are mature adults, those raw adolescent feelings never really go away. This is more or less the point of Bear in Heaven's "Lovesick Teenagers", a song that appeals to our rational minds on a lyrical level while its music aims straight for our hearts by simulating the rush of angst-ridden romance. The verses plumb the depths of despair, but the choruses swoop upwards, ascending to a point so high up that you lose perspective on everything. Inevitably, you come crashing down again, and the song ends with an anti-climactic thud. "Lovesick Teenagers" doesn't attempt to shake you out of your composure or demand that you regress, but the sound of it is intoxicating, and it makes a great case for allowing oneself to embrace dumb passion-- even in some muted, self-conscious way. --Matthew Perpetua

39. Lady Gaga
"Bad Romance"
[Interscope]

In theory, she was an artist you want to root for-- all these ideas about art and celebrity and a flair for the dramatic. But the first few singles made the Lady Gaga project feel so presumptuous, her artsy entitlement overwhelming her songs' occasional strengths. "Bad Romance" was the moment where the music didn't just live up to the (self-inflated) hype, but surpassed it. The track is epic in construction-- by the time she gets to the bridge, more than three minutes in, the realization that there are hooks yet to come is thrilling. It helps that RedOne's production matches the songwriting's torrential drama; the churning, earth-shifting low-frequency synths are a programmatic reflection of the singer's unsteady, perhaps unwise, infatuation. But it's Gaga's performance, the wholly unapologetic fools-rush-in carnal energy, that commitment to emotional bravery in a context of increasingly twee chart pop, that makes "Bad Romance" feel so necessary. --David Drake

38. Dirty Projectors and David Byrne
"Knotty Pine"
[4AD]

It's a dangerous thing when a musical legend lends his or her endorsement to a new band-- the potential new fans can sometimes be lost in the long shadow of the endorser. So it's remarkable how seamlessly David Byrne, whose stamp of approval carries serious weight, integrates into "Knotty Pine". Dirty Projectors don't sound much like Talking Heads, except for the fact that both bands don't sound like anyone else. Yet on the verse that Byrne and Dave Longstreth take together, it's hard to spot who is who-- quite an achievement, given how hard it must be to trace over Byrne's sinuous delivery. Most remarkable of all: Despite Dirty Projectors' trademark unpredictable rhythms and harmonies based on some kind of Martian scale, "Knotty Pine" is still a loveable, friendly song-- one that even those who can't warm to the Projectors could take to heart. --Rob Mitchum

37. Surfer Blood
"Swim"
[Kanine]

Fuck Tim Tebow-- in the past few years, the greatest act of public service from University of Florida students was committed when Surfer Blood changed their name and spared us the indignity of having to say 2009's best piece of Weezer-esque power-pop came from a band called Jabroni Sandwich. But while that might've constituted a grown-up move, "Swim" alternately strikes me as disarmingly naïve and startlingly confident, bundling what could be at least four standalone hooks into less than three minutes. Any self-respecting "pop craftsman" would've whittled away at that "Needles in the Camel's Eye"-quoting intro, the Scandal-ous chorus, or the slip-n-slide Built to Spill riffs, but Surfer Blood just throw it all on the table like a whopping 50% tip. Lesser bands might call that melodic conspicuous consumption wasteful, but it ain't trickin' if you got it. --Ian Cohen

36. Fever Ray
"When I Grow Up"
[Mute/Rabid]

Karin Dreijer-Andersson's Fever Ray turned out to be no sunnier than the Knife's dank, forbidding Silent Shout. If anything, having slowed tempos and excised the Knife's spry arpeggios, it was an even more claustrophobic affair, with all potential escape routes blocked off and shrouded in fog. Even so, the singer's voice pierces "When I Grow Up" like a flashlight cutting through the moors, her semi-steam-of-consciousness narrative rendering romance in almost animistic terms. Running "through the moss in high heels," she crystallizes the album's mood in a single image: It's as though, in a dark corner of a subterranean techno club, she'd discovered a hidden passageway straight to the heart of Jan Švankmajer's Alice. --Philip Sherburne

35. Micachu and the Shapes
"Golden Phone"
[Rough Trade]

Twenty-two-year-old Mica Levi will admit that her aesthetic fondness for musical hybrids and gibberish grew out of her short attention span. Take those impulses, add musical ability and a knack for sussing out perfect collaborators (fellow sonic miscreant Matthew Herbert), and you get "Golden Phone", a mutant playground chant that ranks as one of the year's most intriguing left-field pleasures. Herbert and Levi mash together bratty punk, thrumming bass, cooing girl-group harmonies, mini noise-bursts, and 8-bit bleeps into a multifarious pop sculpture held together by the same sort of London art-world cool that wound through Kala. Few songs sounded as 2009, or even as 2019, as "Phone", but the song's promise might even outweigh its simple gifts. Levi herself suggests as much, in her own way: "give me that nonsense sound and I'll be back." --Eric Harvey

34. Atlas Sound [ft. Noah Lennox]
"Walkabout"
[Kranky]

"If you were 17 I'd feel the same way," sang Tim Granada in 1965 on "What Am I Gonna Do?", B-side to the Dovers' doomed debut single. Was he daft about some hot older chick? Was he cruising jailbait? The confusion only adds to the image of the Dovers as the ultimate Nuggets group, forever stranded in Santa Barbara garageland adolescence. For "Walkabout", 2009's sweetest moment of musical bromance, Bradford Cox and Noah Lennox snatched and looped a moment of this teen turmoil, but rendered it chastely existential-- the memory of youthful ideals countered by that timeless rock'n'roll imperative: don't look back. If Cox's 2008 full-length debut as Atlas Sound was the sound of a young shut-in tinkering with tape players, "Walkabout" was the coming-out party: ambling and sunkissed but feeling the first breeze of autumn. --Stephen Troussé

33. DJ Quik and Kurupt
"9x's Outta 10"
[Mad Science]

DJ Quik on the beat? Kurupt/Young Gotti on the mic? I mean, how could you go wrong? (Other than commercially that is...) Even compared to the rest of the floaty finesse of BlaQKout, there's nary a wasted second on "9x's Outta 10"-- Left Coast legend Kurupt's stark solo spotlight on the otherwise Quik-dominated LP. Kurupt, in a dazzlingly technical turn, finds himself in rare motion as he twists his tongue around Quik's skeletal skull-smashing beat, sliding into the nooks and crannies of the producer's metamorphic "Grindin'"-like bleacher-basher with this brittle, been-there done-that braggadocio and a showcase of pure MCing skills. "Difficult as calculus" is right; Kurupt circles around, switches out words like he's playing Jenga with the verse, and speeds up without spinning out around Quik's spiraling sampledelic ending. And when it stops, two and a half impossibly short minutes later? It's the kind of thing you want to start again. --Paul Thompson

32. The Very Best [ft. Ezra Koenig]
"Warm Heart of Africa"
[Green Owl]

Like most great popmakers, the Very Best understand that if you've stumbled upon something indelible and irresistible, it's not a bad idea to repeatedly cram it down listeners' earholes to the point where it couldn't possibly be dislodged from their heads. "Warm Heart of Africa" has two such elements, the first in the form of a guitar line taken from Nigerian legend Sir Victor Uwaifo's signature hit, "Guitar Boy", a playfully springy thing that propels the song forward in its ebullient bliss. The second earworm, of course, is the hook sung by Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig, which is both maddeningly infectious and charmingly inscrutable. It's Koenig and V-Dubs' appeal boiled down to its essence-- a boyish voice breaking into falsetto, the lyrics dense with cultural allusion. --Joshua Love

31. Lily Allen
"The Fear"
[Capitol]

Lily Allen has at the very least a visitor's pass to the gauzy, half-real celebrity world she's singing about. That doesn't help "The Fear" work as satire, but it still cuts a good deal deeper than you'd expect. That's partly due to the irresistible chorus and to Lily's blissfully callous performance-- the way her sweetness makes "I heard people die while they're tryin' to find them" chilling where it could be excruciating. But it's partly down to these crazy times, the consumer economy running off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote and the boom it magicked up melting into air. Lily's character in "The Fear" senses dimly that something's not real and that it might be her, and what makes her dread and confusion convincing is the fact that a lot of people know how she feels. This song, as delicate and pretty as a bubble, is about 2009 in ways its obvious zings can only hint at. --Tom Ewing